The digital revolution ushered in by widely available computing devices is now well under way, and a secondary wave is now occurring. The secondary wave involves enhanced interconnectivity of various available computing devices, as users require increased mobility and/or less cluttered experience. For example, a traditional desktop PC can provide a great deal of utility. However the user is typically tethered in place by the size of the machine as well as its various wired connections.
Many handheld and smaller profile computing devices currently provide substantial computing power and flexibility to their users. Such flexibility is achieved through connection to various services in a wireless manner, thus allowing freedom of movement. For example, cell phones, personal digital assistants, notebook computers and other devices can communicate wirelessly and are portable. For this reason, they are gaining widespread acceptance, particularly when mobility is of greater importance.
However, portable devices, by the their nature, often lack sufficient computing power and memory resources to run complex applications in various environments. For example, portable devices often cannot be utilized to run customer resource management (CRM) and other business applications that require a great deal of computing resources to perform adequate front-end processing to present rich environments which users customarily expect. Other applications present multi-media environments and/or rely on processor-intensive operations. Such applications cannot now be executed by portable devices due to expanded input and output requirements, such as video and/or audio, or multi-monitor usage. Therefore, there is a need to examine new ways for users of portable and other devices to experience such rich application environments.